Border-Crossing Humor for Elementary School Learning

• In Event: Humor, School, and Injustice: Understanding Students’ Jocular and Transgressive Humor as Critical Literacy Practices

Abstract

Objectives: Drawing from a year-long ethnography with 5th graders from border-crossing families, I demonstrate how students reconfigure borders around languaging, literacies, and knowledge systems through their use of transgressive humor. Findings demonstrate how students engage this critical literacy practice to disrupt colonizing hierarchies such as English vs Spanish, U.S. vs Mexico, Written vs. Oral, Appropriate vs. Inappropriate to create new, inclusive ways of languaging, doing literacy, and belonging within and across borders that traditionally rank and separate. I argue young students from border-crossing families are engaging important sense-making literacies through transgressive humor that should be centered in elementary literacy curricula.
Framework: I draw upon a transborder critical literacy framework to reveal the transgressive subaltern realities and possibilities that thrive in the in-between spaces that can disrupt rankings upheld in institutions like schools (Mignolo, 2012). I view humor as a critical literacy practice, as literacy is never a neutral set of discrete skills, but instead must be understood as contextualized interactions imbued with power that shape what counts as reading and writing (Freire & Macedo, 2005; Street, 1984).
Methods: The data draw from a year-long ethnographic study conducted during the 22-23 school year with two African American elementary school teachers who worked with border-crossing students. I focus on the ways students engaged transgressive humor in Mr. Jones’ 5th grade class in a large, low-income suburban district in the northeastern U.S., in which students often drew upon Spanish and English and their border-crossing knowledges.

Data: Data collection included bi-weekly participant observation (N=21), artifacts of student work (N=29), and interviews with educators and 5th graders (N=25). I used qualitative coding software (Atlas.TI) to code the corpus, iteratively refining the codebook (Saldaña, 2021). My ethnographic analyses drew patterns from across the data to focus on themes central to engaging jocular literacy practices with younger students (Emerson et al., 2011).

Results: Many Mexican and border-crossing communities develop abilities of language play in which peers skillfully insert phonological and semantic nuance within and across named languages for unexpected and comedic interactions that demonstrate their wit and languaging talents (Chávez, 2015; Limón, 1989). Through close attention to students’ transgressive humor, I demonstrate how students regularly engage humor that interrupts oppressive systems that rank and divide their bilingual, border-crossing knowledges, and the countries of their lives. The literacy practices I focus on here are not just about light-hearted joking that draw upon English and Spanish, but are transgressive, pushing us to reconsider what is taught and whose knowledges are valued.

Significance: Transgressive humor is disruptive and has the potential to be productive if we can welcome it as a lens to re-see our curriculum through our border-crossing students’ eyes. This scholarship matters for education research because it demonstrates the robust ways that young people from border-crossing families are already engaging literacy practices across their named languages, homelands, and ways of knowing that can be built upon to disrupt white-streamed versions schooling (Chávez-Moreno, 2022; Urrieta, 2004).

Author

• Sarah Gallo, Rutgers University